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Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Cyber War Extent

In the end, someone is been paid
to do this and volume justifies his paycheck.
The value of those efforts on a case by case basis is quite another
matter and that is a function of sophisticated interpretation work. It is forgotten that too much data can easily
bury important data better that any security in the world.

In practice, if you already know
the answer, it is easy to zero in on useful support. If you know an individual decision maker is
important you can read his mail. That is
all obviously pretty damaging. After
that it starts to fall off pretty quickly.

After that plenty of material
that is simply unknown or unexpected can be in plain sight and no interloper
the wiser.

I am not so convinced that our
world of high security is particularly useful in the majority of cases except
rather briefly where surprise gives a market premium. It might be cheaper to pay an in house person
to produce reams of disinformation to cloud the issue. After all the next design initiative by Apple
may be important, but that is easily obscured by the other fifteen concepts
that were rejected and then handed about loosely.

In the end the acquirer ends up
with reams of disconnected data to interpret never knowing what is actually
important or even been able to recognize it.
You can be sure that the top talents will not be paid to eschew useful
work on the next great weapon in order to sort through tons of clouded data in
the hopes of learning some great secret. One only needs to look at the great
email dump related to the climate warming fiasco to see just how chancy this
all becomes.

It takes the right human mind to
advance the data and if you have that person, then you hardly need someone else’s
mail.

BOSTON (Reuters) - Security experts have discovered
the biggest series of cyber attacks to date, involving the infiltration of the
networks of 72 organizations including the United Nations, governments and
companies around the world.

Security company McAfee, which uncovered the intrusions, said it believed
there was one "state actor" behind the attacks but declined to name
it, though one security expert who has been briefed on the hacking said the
evidence points to China.

The long list of victims in the five-year campaign include the
governments of the United States, Taiwan, India, South Korea, Vietnam and
Canada; the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); the International
Olympic Committee (IOC); the World Anti-Doping Agency; and an array of
companies, from defense contractors to high-tech enterprises.

In the case of the United Nations, the hackers broke into the computer
system of its secretariat in Geneva
in 2008, hid there for nearly two years, and quietly combed through reams of
secret data, according to McAfee.

"Even we were surprised by the enormous diversity of the victim
organizations and were taken aback by the audacity of the perpetrators,"
McAfee's vice president of threat research, Dmitri Alperovitch, wrote in a
14-page report released on Wednesday.

"What is happening to all this data ... is still largely an open
question. However, if even a fraction of it is used to build better competing
products or beat a competitor at a key negotiation (due to having stolen the
other team's playbook), the loss represents a massive economic threat."

McAfee learned of the extent of the hacking campaign in March this
year, when its researchers discovered logs of the attacks while reviewing the
contents of a "command and control" server that they had discovered
in 2009 as part of an investigation into security breaches at defense
companies.

It dubbed the attacks "Operation Shady RAT" and said the
earliest breaches date back to mid-2006, though there might have been other
intrusions. (RAT stands for "remote access tool," a type of software
that hackers and security experts use to access computer networks from afar).

Some of the attacks lasted just a month, but the longest -- on the
Olympic Committee of an unidentified Asian nation -- went on and off for 28
months, according to McAfee.

"Companies and government agencies are getting raped and pillaged
every day. They are losing economic advantage and national secrets to
unscrupulous competitors," Alperovitch told Reuters.

"This is the biggest transfer of wealth in terms of intellectual
property in history," he said. "The scale at which this is occurring
is really, really frightening."

CHINA CONNECTION?

Alperovitch said that McAfee had notified all 72 victims of the
attacks, which are under investigation by law enforcement agencies around the
world. He declined to give more details.

Jim Lewis, a cyber expert with the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, said it was very likely China
was behind the campaign because some of the targets had information that would
be of particular interest to Beijing.

The systems of the IOC and several national Olympic Committees were
breached before the 2008 Beijing
Games. And China views Taiwan
as a renegade province, and political issues between them remain contentious
even as economic ties have strengthened in recent years.

"Everything points to China. It could be the Russians,
but there is more that points to China
than Russia,"
Lewis said.

McAfee, acquired by Intel Corp this year, would not comment on whether China
was responsible.

There was no comment from China on the report.

In Taiwan, an official of the Criminal Investigation Bureau, which has
a cyber crime unit, said he had no knowledge of the McAfee report but added
there had been no cases in recent years of hacking of government websites.

An official from the Japanese trade ministry's information security
policy team said it was difficult to determine whether a specific government
lay behind a cyber attack "although we see which countries the attacks
originate from."

A team put together to investigate hacking was "finalizing some
guidelines. We aim to raise the security level as a whole and build a
partnership between private sector organizations where information can be
shared to prevent such attacks."

STONE AGE

Vijay Mukhi, a cyber-expert based in India,
says some South Asian governments were highly vulnerable to hacking from China.

"I'm not surprised because that's what China does, they are gradually
dominating the cyberworld," he said. "I would call it child's play
(for a hacker to get access to Indian government data) ... I would say we're in
the stone age."

An Indian telecommunications ministry official declined to say whether
he was aware of the hacking on the government.

The U.N. said it was aware of the report, and had started an investigation
to ascertain if there was an intrusion.

McAfee released the report to coincide with the start of the Black Hat
conference in Las Vegas, an annual meeting of security professionals who
promote security and fight cyber crime.

(Additional reporting from Tom Miles in Geneva, Jack Kim in Seoul and
James Pomfret in New Delhi,
editing by Tiffany Wu, Martin Howell, Ron Popeski and Ed Lane)

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About Me

Apr 2017 - 4.1 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO rigorously described as the SPACE TIME PENDULUM, September 2010 I am pleased to report that my essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS' has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) and appeared in their June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in relativity,as well as differential geometry(pure math) and of course analysis. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled Paradigms Shift&. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data and record impressions and interpretations on material read. Do join my blog and receive Four items of interest daily Monday through Saturday.